Recite Works: The ultimate citation checker

Making sure the citations in your manuscript are setup correctly used to be a very tedious task. Throughout the years I’ve seen different scholars have different methods of tackling this problem, but the most common of all seems to either use research assistants to do it or use citation managers like Refworks or Endnote. Both are not without limitations, and what we needed all these years was a simple citation checker. The new free beta Recite seems to be just the thing, and having worked with it a few time this past couple of months I now consider this an essential tool.

Just as an example I uploaded a draft of one of the submissions after its been referenced checked by an untrained undergraduate research assistant.

What I got back was …

Which basically means 24 citations in the text weren’t right and 9 references in the references list did not appear in the text.

You get all kinds of warnings. For example:

This one warns me the that Yeager & Dweck, 2012 citation isn’t in the reference section, and suggests which one of the references I might have meant. In this case it suggests the closest two.

Another type of warning is “style warning”…

This one warns me that I used Stephens et al., 2012 without previously writing the entire list of authors. It is acceptable in APA only if the number of authors is above 5, which might be the cause for error in this instance.

Finally, the reference section errors…

The Blackwell et al. (2007) reference does not appear in the text. It might have been removed by one of the cowriters during changes but wasn’t removed from the reference section.

As you can see, it could be a life saver, and avoid all kinds of reviewer comments about not taking things seriously. I hope they keep maintaining, expanding, and improving the tool, and that they keep it free.

Try it, tell me what you think. If you happen to know of any other similar tools, I’m definitely interested.